Have a laptop with a 1TB HD that I've installed W7 on to the first 330-ish GB (Windows 7 created that 100MB partition as well).

So I have 600GB left (unallocated at present)

I've installed ESXi 5.1 to a USB stick and am booting to that when I want and that all seems to work fine. When I go to add storage, it finds the local disk but only gives me "one layout configuration" and tells me that "All available partitions will be used,..... All file systems and data will be permanently lost", which I don't want in this case as I need to keep the W7 installation.

Can anyone please advise how I can get around this? Can I use GParted to format the unallocated 600GB as VMFS? Or some other tool? I don't mind installing W7 again if I have to.

18 Replies

In doing this I think you would have to have the free space available as unallocated? so you may have the Gparted your HHD first. I would almost take your windows free space you have, gpart it down and then create a new partition. So to ESXi it looks like a separate hard drive. because of the other partition. These would have to be 2 physical partitions. 1 fore windows and 1 for ESXi however you want to divvy it up

Could you also plug in another USB drive and try to use that as the datastore? unless you want to partition your hard drive. You should've been able to use the rest of the free space on the USB as part of the datastore. Hmm How big is your thumb drive?

The free space is unallocated at present. I'll have a look at vmkfstools, thanks.

USB stick is 8GB, doesn't show as available to use any space from it as a datastore. I wouldn't want to anyway. I assumed ESXi don't let you use the same device that ESXi is installed to as a datastore as well when installing to SD and USB devices.. ?

Da Beast, doesn't look like it. Just ran through it to the end, only other option it gives is how much of the 931GB do I want to use for the new partition, even if I choose 600GB I assume that would be written from the start of the disk so overwrite the present partition where W7 is.

The free space is unallocated at present. I'll have a look at vmkfstools, thanks.

USB stick is 8GB, doesn't show as available to use any space from it as a datastore. I wouldn't want to anyway. I assumed ESXi don't let you use the same device that ESXi is installed to as a datastore as well when installing to SD and USB devices.. ?

ESXi will allow you to use the free space from the OS HDD as a datastore. I have mine setup that way and then additional NAS datastores. 8GB yeah not worth it but if you had a 64GB thumb drive it may be nice to have a portable ESXi server with VM's already installed.

Obviously you may not have VMware workstation. But I actually installed several ESXi servers as virtual machines in workstation and then vcenter on the host OS. Using this method I got a full cluster up and running on a single laptop. Obviously it was only for educational purposes, but it still worked rather well.

The free space is unallocated at present. I'll have a look at vmkfstools, thanks.

USB stick is 8GB, doesn't show as available to use any space from it as a datastore. I wouldn't want to anyway. I assumed ESXi don't let you use the same device that ESXi is installed to as a datastore as well when installing to SD and USB devices.. ?

ESXi will allow you to use the free space from the OS HDD as a datastore. I have mine setup that way and then additional NAS datastores. 8GB yeah not worth it but if you had a 64GB thumb drive it may be nice to have a portable ESXi server with VM's already installed.

That's just the thing Chamele0n, it's not allowing me to use the free space on the HDD as a datastore, unless I'm being really stupid?

How do I get it to do that? vSphere isn't letting me, look at what it says at the bottom of the image I posted.

It will format your entire HDD and use it as storage.
You can possibly boot win7 run ESXi as a virtual machine on Win7 and then create an NFS share on the remainder of your disk.
Or use the remainder of your disk as a partition with the ESXi install and datastore on it? (still running as a virtual machine under windows)

Or... Doh.. make a partition on the remainder and assign it to the ESXi VM

So, I have tried to partition it, with gparted. Again, it started threatening to delete the whole disk. Went through all the options yet couldn't see what I need to do. Can you point me in the right direction/technique?

To be honest, still haven't messed with vmkfstools as first suggested..

I made a partition from the 600GB in windows, ESXi saw that partition but still the only option was to delete all partitions.

John, do you think what I'm trying to do will never work? I've seen that it's possible to format the disk as GPT and install windows on it, but I think you must have a UEFI system, which this laptop doesn't.

I guess there is no way to mix GPT and MBR on the same disk?

EDIT: Actually, the bottom of the first paragraph says they can co-exist, hmm:

1st Post

﻿1.Log on Exsi 5.5 with PUTTY.

2. Use the command below to find partition tables created by Windows 7/Windows Server 2012﻿﻿, don't forget to replace the "t10.ATA_____WDC_WD7500BPKX2D00HPJT0_______________________WD2DWXB1AA3R4453" with the name of your disk.﻿

iiteam I'll give it a go, still got that empty space on the disk that I could try this on.

Bit I'm not clear about is number 3, "Use the command below to set all 4 partition, including the new one". As far as I can tell the set parameter in the partedUtil command is used to create partitions. Does this mean I would have to do this BEFORE installing windows (as the command itself will delete all data on the existing partitions)? Or I can keep my current partitions and data and use this method and I will not lose data?

No, you need to install Windows 7 first. In that case the Windows 7 will set partition 1 to 3 and leave the rest of the hard disk unused. After installation of the Windows 7, boot to EXSi. Partition number 3 in my case was created to be used with Windows 7 as "Archive"﻿ partition, I put there all user files like-Contacts,Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favorites,Links,Movie,Music,Pictures,Saved Games,Videos﻿,﻿ it is my best practice for setup of Windows 7. In your case it can be irrelevant. PartedUtil create the partition table﻿, only. That it is what it does. The utility doesn't mess with the files in partitions by itself, you will not loss the data, but make the backup first, as the best practice. I will do... As I point to you before to use:

﻿partedUtil getptbl /vmfs/devices/disks/"your disk name"

to get your actual partitions table after you login on EXSi.

So, when you find the existing partition table on your drive, then you can use the:

to recreate a new one, replacing the number of sector with yours and replacing ﻿the number of partitions with yours and adding the partition to use with EXSi for datastore. In my case it is was the number 4.